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I am a longtime journalist who also explores the topic for The New York Times, Sierra, Popular Science, Smithsonian and other publications. I write often about India, since my wife is from there, and sometimes cross over into my passion for adventure sports like mountaineering, surfing and kayaking. No one understands the climate like an outdoorsman.

The energy-climate space abounds with ideas, conflicts, contradictions, and agonizing choices that will have a deep impact on our lives and those of our children. And there's money to be made in solving these problems. Lots of it.

Lessons In Sustainability From India's Entrepreneurs

If succeeding as an entrepreneur in the U.S. is difficult, then doing so in India is next to impossible. Cities are polluted and crowded with slums, the government is shamefully corrupt, and millions of potential customers are in distant villages where there is no Internet or even electricity. But entrepreneurs are figuring out how to grow under these difficult circumstances, with lessons for us all.

That is the message of a report [pdf] issued last week by advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. It amounts to a pep talk for a global economy still in the swoon of recession and facing looming shortages of water and power and the specter of climate change. All corporate citizens face stiff headwinds, but, as the report notes, “the world’s sustainability challenges are arriving first and fastest in India.”

The report highlights Indian companies that have applied some universal principles that other businesses may have forgotten. Those principles include self-reliance, looking to people instead of machines for solutions, thinking in whole systems, and embracing the Indian spirit of “jugaad,” a Hindi word that means overcoming limited resources by improvising like crazy.

If these entrepreneurs can succeed in the face of daunting obstacles, the report implies, then there’s no reason you can’t. Take a look at some examples from the report:

‘Human Bank Machines’: Thousands of Indian villages are so remote that they have no bank branch, meaning that millions of rupees end up hidden under mattresses instead of in circulation. The Reserve Bank of India employs “business correspondents” who serve as traveling bank tellers for these far-flung customers. As of 2011, the bank employed 60,000 correspondents who had opened 75 million bank accounts. The accounts pay about 4% interest, and the correspondents receive a commission on every transaction and earn up to $200 a month, in a country where the average monthly wage is $65.

Hot Lunch Delivery: More than 5,000 people are employed in the megacity of Mumbai delivering hot, homemade lunches to day workers. The “dabbawalla” — literally, “a person with a box” — doesn’t make the lunch; he picks it up from the worker’s home and delivers it in steel containers, and then transports the empties back home. In 1998, Forbes gave the dabbawallas of Mumbai a six-sigma rating, meaning that they deliver with 99.9999999% efficiency. That’s one error for every six million meals. The dabbawallas’ latest competition? American fast-food outlets like McDonald’s, KFC and Taco Bell.

Amazon, Meet UPS: E-commerce company Flipkart has made itself into the largest online bookseller in a country where there is no reliable, inexpensive courier service like FedEx or UPS. Furthermore, Indian consumers are leery of buying goods they haven’t laid eyes on. Flipkart solved these obstacles by doing the deliveries itself, letting customers inspect goods before buying, and accepting cash on delivery. Like Amazon, the company is now branching out from books into a larger universe of products.

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There are many companies and organizations that have taken the constraints they have to face in India in their stride and innovated to come up with interesting solutions. We as an online publication for positive news have come across many such grass-root innovations that can help solve a local problem. From low-cost sanitary napkin dispensers to gravity-based water purifier – these innovations are very creatively conceptualized and very effectively executed by simple people, to address an issue that they have faced in most cases. This just shows that it is possible for people of a country to not get bogged down by the political or economical environment, but to find ways around it.

To answer your question, I do think there is something for the US and other developed nations to takeaway from this, as it is known (and has been seen even in the recent past) that stability is not permanent and there is always scope for innovation. ‘Jugaad’ may be an oft-used and probably abused word in the Indian context, but it does have the potential to tide people over difficult times. The danger arises when it becomes synonymous with lack of incentive to change a bad situation or apathy from the government’s side, because people have learnt to adapt with what they have.

There are many companies and organizations that have taken the constraints they have to face in India in their stride and innovated to come up with interesting solutions. We as an online publication for positive news have come across many such grass-root innovations that can help solve a local problem. From low-cost sanitary napkin dispensers to gravity-based water purifier to a farmer devising a water mill to generate electricity – these innovations are very creatively conceptualized and very effectively executed by simple people, to address an issue that they have faced in most cases. This just shows that it is possible for people of a country to not get bogged down by the political or economical environment, but to find ways around it.

To answer your question, I do think there is something for the US and other developed nations to takeaway from this, as it is known (and has been seen even in the recent past) that stability is not permanent and there is always scope for innovation. ‘Jugaad’ may be an oft-used and probably abused word in the Indian context, but it does have the potential to tide people over difficult times. The danger arises when it becomes synonymous with lack of incentive to change a bad situation or apathy from the government’s side, because people have learnt to adapt with what they have.

Hey David, I must appreciate your research and its interpretation. The Husk Power systems really doing well in remote places …with E-Chaupal helping farmers to get a handsome quote. Apart from these there huge number of start-ups which showed their USP in last 3 years and the wave is getting bigger day by day. Hope to see a Entrepreneur-Village in India.

There is something about India that makes its youth think and deliver efficient solutions to problems, sometimes in bizarre ways – interestingly.

It could be the resource crunch, which once pulled the population back and put pressure on its shoulders. Today the same pressure has brought out the productive best in them. Additionally, there is this enormous “comparison-data” with today’s youth, that comes with their experience of having seen the old and the new, the rich and the poor and the west and east.

The examples quoted are probably not the best, but well written article.

David,there is a popular saying that ones brain works double when it is under pressure and time and space bound.this is what exactly happened to our country. billions of people of which 70% are without proper access to basic things.these discoveries are out of sheer problems,america being a completely different country who works out day and night before the problem arises ,i don’t think these lessons will be applicable.one great lesson that your writing will spread is that problems always comes with solutions,we see the problems easily as they occupies the top place wheres the solution is always at the bottom.

Krishna, I agree that the mind works better when under pressure. Things aren’t as hard in America as they are in India, but they are harder than they used to be. More Americans are discovering their own version of jugaad to cope with cope with their current difficulties.

The term “jugaad” is seldom applied within a positive context in India; instead it is considered as a way of solving problems quickly by hook or by crook. It is hardly a recipe for business success or human achievement for that matter. The real lesson US businesses can learn from these examples is that if necessity is the mother of invention, then curiosity is the father. Seek new opportunities by closely observing how humans interact with their environment and ask why. Imagine, develop and experiment with multiple what-if scenarios that would change their existing approach. Assess reactions.